Brazil's Sorocaba Engineering School (Facens) is improving its Smart Campus Program, the mission of which is to create an ecosystem of leadership formation capable of collaboratively solving the emerging problems of society, as well as generating products and services of high added value. The initiative employs a variety of technologies, including radio frequency identification (RFID) and Internet of Things (IoT), to achieve its goals.

The Smart Campus project is intended to support the formation of what Farcens calls a "citizen engineer," through the solution of real-world problems. The initiative adopts several aspects of the Smart Cities concept, with a focus on education, energy, industry and business, environment, mobility and safety, health and quality of life, information technologies and communication (ICT), and urbanization.

Facens' Smart Campus Program develops, implements, tests, analyzes and replicates solutions for intelligent cities on the university's campus, as an area for studies of solutions that can be replicated in actual cities. It prioritizes the transformation of real problems into solutions applicable in an urban context, aligning them with the needs, crises and challenges of Brazil for the coming decades.

According to Professor Regiane Relva Romano, who is responsible for implementing the advanced technologies that support the initiative, RFID and the IoT concept permeate various parts of the project. "We use RFID in vehicular and pedestrian access control," Romano says, "but now, for the next year, we will be using the library and the Industry 4.0 lab that is being assembled." She adds that books will be tagged via RFID, which will facilitate the location of specific volumes and help the college to manage conservation efforts, among other benefits.

The IoT concept, Romano says, is present in several Smart Campus activities and subprojects. "We are using sensors for temperature, pressure and computer vision, among other resources," she states. "The system integrates the Internet of Things concept with automatic computing and data capture (AIDC) and cloud computing."